Carry On... #Halloween
No one ever disbelieved, in the last months of 1938, anything they heard reported to them over their radio sets. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about their little affairs, serene in their assurance that everything the mass media told them about the world was generally true, accurate and sincere. Yet across the gulf of airwaves, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded the radio audience with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And on the 30th of October, 1938, came the great disillusionment.
Invaders From Mars
In case you haven't worked it out by now, I am of course paraphrasing The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells.
Originally published in 1898, Wells' novel has become the template for all subsequent "alien invasion" stories. In fact, so many subsequent stories have been directly influenced by this one, a lesser author might have been tempted to sue for plagiarism. Happily, H. G. Wells wasn't as petty as some other writers.
The Martians in H. G. Wells' story very quickly overpower all human resistance, and are only defeated in the end by Earthly germs and bacteria, to which they had no immunity (sorry... spoilers).
H. G. Wells' novel was obviously science fiction, and not meant to be taken as literal fact. If anything, Wells was making a comment about the cavalier manner in which the British Empire of the Victorian era was blithely invading every corner of the planet and trampling various indigenous societies into dust. "How would you feel if someone even bigger landed in England and did that to you?" Wells essentially asked his readers.
As a work of speculative fiction, the Martians in The War of the Worlds were very obviously meant by Wells as a metaphor. No one reading the novel actually believed that such an invasion might one day come to pass.
It was therefore a little bit of a surprise to many on the 30th of October, 1938, when the Martians actually invaded New Jersey.
Of course, it needs to be stressed that the 1938 invasion was not what it appeared to be. Despite the widespread panic, there weren't any invaders from Mars. The very idea is frankly ridiculous.
The invasion had actually come from Mercury.
Invaders From Mercury
The Mercury Theatre on the Air was a weekly radio drama, presented on CBS by the 23-year-old Orson Welles and his "Mercury Theatre" repertory company. First launched in July of 1938, it broadcast a series of adapted-for-radio performances of classic works of literature every Sunday evening. On the 30th of October, they broadcast their Halloween episode: a version of The War of the Worlds.
In what has now become perhaps the most infamous hour in the history of radio, Welles presented listeners with a real-time account of a Martian landing in New Jersey, complete with live-on-the-scene commentary, interviews with eyewitnesses, statements from Government officials, and even a couple of weather reports. In short, the Mercury Theatre presented its listeners with a very plausible version of what an alien invasion would sound like on an American radio station in 1938.
And they did a good job. They did such a good job, in fact, that rather a lot of people thought the Martian invasion was really happening. Not everyone was pleased.
Whether the subsequent (and much-publicised) panic was really as extensive as the contemporary press had described it to be is a matter of some discussion by modern historians. But there seems to be a broad consensus about a couple of things. First, the Mercury Theatre (and Orson Welles specifically) had not intended their broadcast as a hoax. They were performing their Halloween episode, and they thought it would be fun. They were very genuinely surprised to learn that people were actually taking it literally.
Second, the people who were taken in by the broadcast were taken in because it was presented as news, delivered to them over a medium they had come to trust.
Orson Welles and his colleagues were still visualizing their radio audience as if it was a theatre audience. People (they assumed) would sit down in front of the radio with the express purpose of hearing the Mercury Theatre. They would then listen to the broadcast from start to finish, giving it their undivided attention with the full understanding that they had tuned in to a radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds.
No one had taken into account what the modern world would now call "channel-hopping".
By 1938, very few people actually listened to the radio as if it was a theatrical performance. People would keep it on in the background, not really listening to it, or they would "browse" from station to station, not looking for anything specific, until they found something worth listening to. On that particular night, anyone "surfing the airwaves" might have come across what they took to be a simple programme of dance music, which at some point was then interrupted by a breaking-news bulletin about strange things happening in New Jersey.
Without actually setting out to do so, Orson Welles had discovered Fake News.
The film we are showing this Thursday is a recreation of that fateful evening, produced for television in 1975.
The Night That Panicked America incorporates the original Orson Welles broadcast, but it also puts that broadcast into context, showing the reactions of a (fictional) cross section of radio listeners.
It's very easy to sit here in 2023 and point and laugh at the gullible yokels who actually believed that Martians were attacking New Jersey, but the American public learned an important lesson that night.
They learned that mass media has power.
They learned that when mass media reports something as fact, people believe it (no matter how outlandish it is) because it's coming from the mass media.
Marshall McLuhan famously said that "The Medium is the Message" but he didn't say that until 1964. Orson Welles stumbled across the same thing in 1938 when he played a trick-or-treat prank on the entire country.
In The Night That Panicked America, we get to see how it happened.
We will screen The Night That Panicked America at 7.30 on Thursday, the 26th of October at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.
Comments
Post a Comment